I have an App Idea, Where do I Start? A Step-by-Step Guide From A Founder.

At times, we get stuck on many things such as staring at our mobile app with the frozen screen, making ourselves confused with unwanted steps to get things done instead of doing it straight, sinking in too many things to find one small need and many more situations. These are all pain points as you are a user of some app ideas in the market.

When you realise that this is not done in the right way, it’s at the same time you get the spark to make it right or better and think about how to come up with a good app idea. This is just the beginning of any startup mobile app idea.

I’ve been sucked up once with Google rank-tracking software. They had many things instead of showing what my Google ranks. Every time I have to go across many things to reach the ranking reports. It’s not their fault, they are trying to satisfy everyone and I am just one more user to them.

I realised there are so many things that can be done other than Google ranking. So I found a new idea and started up my own product called Serpple.

Finding new ideas can be an easy task but doing it right is the toughest one. Great app idea starts with the right initial potential users that you get in the beginning. Instead of explaining more about your startup app idea, ask them where they are stuck and what are all the pain points they have as the same as you.

Those are the fundamental steps you need to do in the beginning to make sure you app idea is good. The data collected from the potential users are going to your long time road map for your product.

The next step for your creative app idea is conclude all the features and find the right development team. Making it a successful app includes further steps like finding the right monetization strategy and preparing pitch decks for angel investors and raise money for further development.

Lets discuss more about how to come up with a good app idea in this blog.

Step 1: Identifying Opportunities for a Mobile App Idea

New app ideas begins with an opportunity to fulfil something not yet touched by any companies. Does it not matter how bigger size the target market is. For this as a startup founder either you must be in a position where you are dealing things manually and you believe it can be done easily with a mobile app.

Good app idea does not need be a new idea, it can be a enhancement of an existing systems too. For example, there are popular app in the marketing which is good its all app’s features. App solves many issues but the problem is that the target audience. The app solves problems to wide range of audience but the same can perform even better when it is designed for a specific group of audience.

Trust me, the SaaS industry is moving along with this approach where the mobile app market is target to the specific group of industry rather than focusing wide range of audience.

Try to find your idea’s value proposition.

Value Proposition

A value proposition is a simple statement that summarizes why a customer would choose your product or service.

It communicates the clearest benefit that customers receive by giving you their business.

Source: Value Proposition Examples From HelpScout

How to Come Up with a Good App Idea?

In the first case, where you believe that a mobile app idea can solve your work, do the following things to make sure it will solve it with cent percent.

The manual or an operations without a mobile apps should have a routine process. Just keep monitoring them and identify the list of issues happens in the entire operations.

From the complete list, separate the lists that can be solved by adapting mobile technologies for example, location tracking, updating the statuses of operations anything that are closely related to the mobility solutions.

The final list will be your business plan. Keep in focus that the main reason of bring your idea is to develop mobile apps which can makes life simpler and make any operation smooth. So the app should solve the specific problem that you have separated from the complete list.

Get Inspired by the Current Top Apps

Once your business plan is ready, the next thing is to make sure how to design your app development. Just start browing or googling existing apps that support same or similar functionalities and see the way how they solved the problem.

Generally browsing app stores for your industry specific apps can help you to come up with great app ideas. You can use the existing apps as an inspiration for your new app idea stacks or you can get some idea from the existing apps as well.

Look at this image where you can see the top “Free” fintech apps from playstore.

App stores have a sections where they list out all the top apps and popular apps. Choose your specific industry and start using them which will lead you to the directions you want to your apps development.

The next process would be studying the market research like how these apps have been marketed and how many users are using the apps. An important thing when you do this research is finding the reviews from the existing app users.

You can find more ideas and what customers feels from the review sections. Collect all the reviews if possible and short them out as issues, feedbacks and performance. Start focusing the reviews with feedback first and make sure the app will not have same issues as your competitor and of course better performance than your competitor.

Keep Track of News and Events in the Tech Industry

Tech industry changes are happening rapidly. They keep upgrading themselves based their market research and users’ behaviour.

Never miss an update. Keep your finger on the pulse of your selected industry and try to be ahead by keeping your thoughts and innovations one step ahead of them.

For the existing app market they have many things to consider starts value proposition, potential customers and many other things where you have just come up with your idea and make things starts fresh get inspired more to support your app idea.

Refer this article to find all the top 51 news

Step 2: Brainstorming and Researching App Ideas

When do you think the idea will start making money and becomes monopoly in the selected app category? It is not just based on the number of installs in google play store or app store. It is completely depends on the usage. How frequently your target users are coming back to you app and how would their life without your app.

Spend Time Brainstorming Your App Ideas

To make your target market users life easier with your awesome creative app ideas, you mobile app ideas should begin brainstorming and listing all the possible solutions to a problem.

Brainstorming during your peak creative flow opens a wealth of original and insightful ideas. This active engagement fuels momentum, breaks down mental barriers, and creates a positive feedback loop, boosting both the quantity and quality of your creative output. This will create that “Aha” moment with your innovation.

And do not forget one thing, the inspiration comes from anywhere and never forget to take note of your thoughts.

Watch this video from TED where Richard St. John explaining 4 Simple ways to have great idea.

Study the Competition and Market

I am sure you don’t want to create something that already exist. To make sure that 100% studying the competitions by searching the existing apps becomes necessary.

Start collecting the top most features of different brand’s mobile apps and do a extensive market research to enhance them.

Research Your Target Audience

Finalising all your features of enhancements, will end at this research. Create a survey using any free tools and list out the questions that are more related to your solutions and how its gonna solve the pain point.

Start collecting the target market users details and share your survey link and get them all answered. These earlier users will be your potential customer.

Step 3: Validating Your App Idea

There are methods to make sure your new app ideas are valid and will work out in the market by spending less or no money when you have small in-house team.

Read this book called “Sprint” and it helped me when I was working with a startup idea.

Book Name: Sprint – How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days Paperback english by Jake Knapp.
Review from Reader: Read this book according to the days mentioned. Read the contents of Monday on Monday, same for the rest of the chapters. It will help you to understand how much work is done in day and the pace required to conduct a sprint. Amazing book. A must read for every designer!

Research Your Competitors

Consider your mobile app idea and mobile app development, as a game. If all the games are same what would be the best chose for the game lovers? How do you understand what do they expect in the game?

This is where learning starts from the existing market. Try to understand the market and learn about its falls and trends. As I mentioned earlier, collect all the customer reviews about your competitors from all the sources like app stores, google and everywhere.

Analyze your competitors from the customer’s point of view and find their apps’ pros and cons.

Create Prototypes

After finding the pro’s and cons, its time to find how your mobile app idea is going to solve those. Start creating digital prototypes and invite people to try it out.

Interactive digital prototypes are one of the best idea validation discussed in the book called “Sprint”. It will be cost effective and your trial users will be happy to give opinion as it will be more interactive.

Prototype does not need to be fully functional. It should be like a wire frame design where you users can visually explore the product idea before its fully developed.

Collect and Analyze Early User Feedback

Start collecting the user feedbacks from your interactive digital prototypes by taking notes or using heatmap analytics softwares like microsoft clarity.

These are the fundamental elements you will fix, add or enhance with your business idea.

Step 4: Refining Your Great App Idea

At this stage, if you compare your mobile app idea at the time you got the spark, with the current stage of your great app idea, with more data collected from early user, this refining idea would not be a big problem. Just make sure what you create will meet the real purpose by properly refining it.

Fine-tune Your Chosen App Idea

Find out the places where your app concept can be improved based on your market research and competitor analysis. Define a new development plan with these improvements.

Your development plan should contain three different list (For your own marketing strategy purpose) which includes basic features, existing and enhanced features and finally the unique features.

After this stage, make sure the development team starts working with the unique features first and analyse how these unique features solving the problem of your target audience.

Create a User Persona for Your App

As a part of your marketing strategy you need this customer or user persona. Although you know your target audiences, its better to drill down a deep to know more details like, gender, age, location and much more which will help you to shape up your marketing campaigns.

Customer persona can also help you to redefine your roadmap based on their preferences and interests.

Watch this video which explains how customer persona works and how it should be defined for your startup.

Step 5: Developing a Product Strategy for Your App

Time to be more technical now if you are a non-technical person who starts a tech startup. At this stage everything evolves around more a technical words like web app, iOS app, android app, devices and apps, app designs and UI/UX. Buckle up and try to understand all these terms slowly. Finding UI design agency for startups is crucial because they should understand your app idea.

Determine Your Monetization Strategy

Find the right software development company and know more about the technology stacks and its disadvantages and advantages. This will lead you to the next step of finalizing monetization model for your app.

Your monetization plan can have either free trial, premium membership or a freemium model, but its all connected with technology stacks.

Before finalizing one plan, experiment the other startup monetization strategies with set of customers and find their feedbacks and find the right plan.

Create Full Prototype

Before the mobile app development process, its time to expand your digital prototype to a complete wireframe with all the basic, existing and enhanced features and unique features. At this stage, the entire app idea should be in the wire frame.

Estimate the Cost of Building Your App

This is the place you will evaluate your financial aspects like how much money needs for the app development and how you can save money for the marketing strategies when you are hiring a marketing agency for startups. Collect quotations from the multiple software development companies and compare them all.

Before selecting the right company, compare their expertise of relevant industry and other resources of the company. Once you finalised the company, be clear about the timelines and milestones and payment terms.

Step 6: Turning Your Idea into a Reality

Generally the app development process is complicated for a big budgeted prototypes and ideas. Try to find the right approach like hiring a virtual team or in-house team using hiring agents, or outsourcing the project to an established company. Its time to decide that.

Fund Raising

If you are not having sufficient fund and looking for an agency which can help you bring your app into a reality where you can get use of it fund raising. Usually its really hard to find startup mobile app development company who can help you for fund raising. Talk to our AppKodes sales live support as we can assist you with this.

Launch and Scale

Most of the creative app ideas fails when its comes to scale. So make you find a pattern where fixing the bugs after the launch, continuous improvement of app performance and collective user feedback. This pattern will help you to scale your mobile app.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

There is no general formula to help you decide if you should move forward with your app idea or drop it. I have heard stories that products that were put on hold for a longer time got picket up and went viral once its launched. So there is no gurantee your idea will work or not work.

Its natural that all the app idea will look stronger and make you feel you are completely right. There is no problem in testing and redefining your app idea. This can be done by developing a MVP with a help of right MVP software development.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Developing an App

There are many other things other than software development challenges for startup which includes the following things.

Cost underestimation: Everyone believe their business model is strong and does not mean that your approximate cost estimations is accurate. Have a strict financial plan as your spending your own money. Discuss with group of app developers and ask their opinion about how long time and cost it would take.

Ignoring market research: Many times good business ideas fails when they ignore the research metrics. App market is completely depends on how it performances and how users react.

Executing Your App Development Process

Validating your mobile app idea stacks is all about transforming it into a minimum viable product (MVP) before developing the entire app. This MVP should have within it only the core functionalities that are inevitably needed to validate your generating app ideas with early customers.

Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

Developing and geting your minimum viable product (MVP) launched is a shrewd strategy. It demands to validate your product idea with real users before subsidizing heavily in development. Here’s a quick focus to get you started

Sort Out Core Features

Concentrate on the core functionalities that crack the most crucial issues for your target users. Prioritize these features to ensure that your MVP app design delivers maximum value and validates your mobile application concept effectively.

Formulate Your MVP

Keep in mind, creating the MVP yourself using crowdfunding platforms, low-code tools or hiring a development company to develop an app should be done after analysing your technical expertise and budget.

Examine with PickFu

Make the best out of PickFu, a platform that authorizes you to gather user feedback on varied characteristics of your MVP, like design, usability, and features.

Collect User Feedback

Industriously pursue feedback from real users through surveys or user testing sessions. This will benefit you to iterate and enhance your product based on their on their demands.

Submit App to Google Play Store and App Store

Make a note of these following steps to successfully submit your app to both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. These points can’t be ignored as they will help you create developer accounts, get your app ready for submission, make certain it meets platform requirements, and complete the submission process for both app repositories.

Create Developer Accounts

Google Play Store

Click on the provided link and Sign up for a Google Play Developer account (https://play.google.com/console). This account at Google Play Console comes with a one-time registration fee.

Apple – AppStore

Register for an Apple Developer account at Apple Developer Program by clicking on this link (https://developer.apple.com/programs/). And, this also comes with an annual subscription fee.

Prepare Your App for Submission

Comprehensively test your app that is functions properly on varied devices and screen sizes.

Get all necessary app information ready, especially the basics such as the app name, description, keywords, and screenshots.

Compile a privacy policy that goes hand in hand with the platform requirements and make sure that you include a link to it within your app, this is mandatory.

Meet Platform Requirements

You should guarantee your users that your app meets all the guidelines. So, follow Google’s Launch Checklist this link https://developer.android.com/distribute/best-practices/launch/launch-checklist

Make sure your app complies with their standards by agreeing to Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines by clicking here https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

Submit Your App

Google Play Store

• Upload your app bundle or APK to the Google Play Console.
• Fill in the required details such as app description, category, and contact information.
• Set up clear pricing and distribution options.
• Review and publish your app.

App Store

• Use Xcode to archive and upload your app to the App Store Connect.
• Complete the app metadata, including app name, category, and keywords.
• Submit your app for review.
• Once you get approved, your app will be available along with other apps for download on the App Store.

These are the detailed steps you have to follow to ensure a smooth submission process for both the Google Play Store and the App Store.

Market Your App

Start by creating a productive marketing plan that speaks directly to your audience adressing their pain points.

To connect with more people and expand you tribe consider using paid ads and collaborating with influencers your target audiences awe at.

Its highly important to stay on track and monitoring how well your marketing strategies work so, keep an eye on important metrics to make sure they are working.

Use PickFu polls to gather feedback from users, which can help you make ongoing improvements.

Conclusion

So now, you must have now got hold of the thread, to ensure the success of your mobile application, you’ve to start by defining and assessing your market segment, identifying your target end-users’ needs, and setting clear app goals.

Then, focus on building an intuitive and user-friendly interface that meets the expectations of the local neighborhood, this will enhance usability.

Consider leveraging cost-effective, high-quality no-code or low-code software solutions to simplify and manage the development without compromising on functionality at any cost.

Having done this you need to validate your app idea through comprehensive market research to assure its demand and viability. Design a detailed plan for application development, ensuring thorough testing to optimize user experience and functionality.

Once you get all these done, navigate the submission process of the Android and Apple App Stores meticulously to meet their guidelines and requirements.

Finally, the root that firmly holds your entire effort and innovation lies in crafting a robust marketing strategy that includes paid advertising, influencer collaborations, and performance tracking to effectively promote and reach your app’s target audience.

Slowly establish a solid foundation for your app’s journey, feeling safe as it resonates with users and achieves impactful results in this ever changing dynamic digital landscape.

Additional Resource:

• Project Management Methodologies for Startup – Complete guide on selecting right PM methodology.